Assignment task:
Abstinence Exercise and work:
This exercise is designed to help the student (which is you) experience some of the feelings/thoughts that addicted individuals experience when they quit their drug or behavior of choice. This exercise requires that the student give up a substance (e.g., nicotine, caffeine, or alcohol) or a behavior (e.g., Internet use, eating sweets, playing video/computer games, watching television, cell-phone usage) for a period of 1 week. For those students who have difficulty identifying a substance or behavior, please contact me so we can discuss what might be a challenge for the student to give up for this time period.
During this assignment the student will (a) write an introductory letter to the student's substance/behavior, (b) keep an abstinence log of the student's experiences, and (c) write a summary work which will serve as the conclusion to the ONE-week exercise. This assignment will have the following components:
a) "Letter to my Substance/Behavior" - written in the first person to the substance/behavior from which the student is abstaining, will be due before the abstinence period begins.
b) An abstinence log - This log will describe the student's feelings and reactions, especially focusing on times the student "lapses" or experiences temptation. It is especially important to indicate times when it was both difficult and easy to abstain, as well as those specific circumstances during which the student "slipped" (birthdays, holidays, and weekends seem especially difficult). Although daily entries into the log are not required, daily entries have been reported as most helpful by previous students. The log needs to be computer generated (a minimum of half a page per entry) and should have a minimum of five entries during the week.
c) A summary work - This is to be a minimum three-page work describing the abstinence experience (e.g., did the student succeed or fail, what influenced the student, what was the process like for the student, etc.) and will serve as the conclusion to the student's overall experience.
Note: This work does not have to be in APA format, but does need a cover page